Maggie Smith, the two-time Oscar-winning actor best known for playing the stern Professor McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” movie franchise and the tart-tongued Dowager Countess on “Downton Abbey,” died Friday, her publicist and children confirmed.
She was 89.
Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, paid tribute to their mother in a joint statement. “It is with great sadness we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith. She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning,” they wrote.
“She was with friends and family at the end. She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” Larkin and Stephens wrote. They did not immediately specify a cause of death.
In a career spanning nearly seven decades, Smith established herself as one of the most towering and beloved British actors of her generation, revered for her witty line deliveries and self-possession.
She was frequently honored by her peers. She won Academy Awards for her performances in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969) and “California Suite” (1978). She earned four Emmy Awards, including three for her role as Violet Crawley on “Downton.”
She received Tony nominations for her performances in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives” and Tom Stoppard’s “Night and Day” before winning the best actress prize for “Lettice and Lovage” in 1990 — the same year she was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II.
Margaret Natalie Smith was born Dec. 28, 1934, in the town of Ilford in East London. She studied acting at the Oxford Playhouse School and made her professional acting debut in a production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in 1952.
She quickly proved herself to be a prolific performer in theatrical productions in both the U.K. and the U.S. She appeared in the London revue “Share My Lettuce,” debuted on Broadway with “New Faces of ’56” and acted regularly in plays at the famed Old Vic theater in London.
Laurence Olivier recognized her natural talent and recruited her to join the inaugural company of Britain’s National Theatre in 1963. The following year, Smith played Desdemona in Olivier’s “Othello.” Two years later, Smith reprised her role in Olivier’s film adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy and picked up her first Oscar nomination.
Smith introduced herself to a wider audience as the eponymous character in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” directed by Ronald Neame. She portrayed an uninhibited, intellectually adventurous teacher at an all-girls school in Edinburgh, Scotland, who instructs her charges to ignore the curriculum.
The New York Times film critic Vincent Canby praised her expressing “a staggering amalgam of counterpointed moods, switches in voice levels and obliquely stated emotions, all of which are precisely right.”
“Jean Brodie” marked the start of a long period that found Smith alternating between high-profile performances in live theater and an eclectic array of movie roles. She appeared in mystery films such as “Murder by Death,” “Death on the Nile” and “Evil Under the Sun.”
Smith won her second Oscar for her supporting turn in “California Suite,” an adaptation of a Neil Simon play about the private lives of guests at a luxury hotel in Los Angeles. Smith portrayed a celebrated British actor reckoning with her complex marriage to a closeted gay man played by Michael Caine.
Smith was nominated for a total of six Oscars, including for her work in the 1972 comedy “Travels With My Aunt,” the 1985 Merchant-Ivory drama “A Room With a View,” and the 2001 ensemble mystery “Gosford Park.” She was also regularly recognized by the British Academy Film Awards, the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
She arguably reached the height of her international fame when she was cast in the big-screen versions of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series as Professor Minerva McGonagall, the steely and sharp-witted Hogwarts professor who keeps a watchful eye over “The Boy Who Lived.”
When the British newspaper The Telegraph asked Smith why she took the role, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.” In other interviews, she suggested playing McGonagall in seven of the franchise’s eight entries was not creatively fulfilling — though she appreciated she was involved in projects that excited her young grandchildren.
Smith further cemented her celebrity with “Downton Abbey,” playing an aristocratic earl’s mother, a stubborn and fiercely judgmental widow whose worldview has not evolved beyond the Victorian era. She played the Dowager Countess for all six seasons of the show and two films. (The movies were distributed by Focus Features, a unit of NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.)
In an interview at a film and radio festival in the U.K. in 2017, Smith joked that she had “led a perfectly normal life” until the producers of “Downton Abbey” came knocking on her door. “Nobody knew who the hell I was,” she said. But with the worldwide success of the series and a trio of Emmys, that all changed.
She remained busy in recent years, starring in films such as “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” “Quartet” and “The Lady in the Van.” Her most recent movie appearance was in “The Miracle Club,” released last year in the U.K.
Smith is survived by two sons and five grandchildren.